The Eyre Affair tn-1

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘You don’t need my permission.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. I just wanted to ask if you think this could all have had some other outcome?’

  I placed a flannel over my face and groaned silently. It wasn’t something I wanted to deal with right now.

  ‘No. Landen, you must marry her. You promised her and besides—‘ I thought quickly. ‘—I have a job in Ohio.’

  ‘Ohio?’

  ‘As a LiteraTec. One of my colleagues at work offered it to me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A guy named Cable. Great fellow he is, too.’

  Landen gave up, sighed, thanked me and promised to send me an invitation. He left the house quietly—when I came downstairs ten minutes later, my mother was still wearing a forlorn ‘I wish he were my son-in-law’ sort of look.

  24. Martin Chuzzlewit is reprieved

  ‘My chief interest in all the work that I have conducted over the past forty or so years has been concerned with the elasticity of bodies. One tends to think only of substances such as rubber in this category but almost everything one can think of can be bent and stretched. I include, of course, space, time, distance and reality…”

  Professor Myceoft Next

  ‘Crofty—!’

  ‘Polly—!’

  They met at the shores of the lake, next to the swathe of daffodils that rocked gently in the warm breeze. The sun shone brightly, throwing a dappled light upon the grassy bank on which they found themselves. All about them the heavy scent of summer lay upon the land, bringing with it a feeling of calm and serenity that hushed the senses and relaxed the soul. A little way down the water’s edge an old man in a black cape was seated upon a stone, idly throwing pebbles into the crystal water. It might have been almost perfect, in fact, apart from the presence of Felix8, his face not yet healed, standing on the daffodils and keeping a careful eye on his charges. Worried about Mycroft’s commitment to his plan, Acheron had allowed him back into ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ to see his wife.

  ‘Have you been well, my love?’ asked Mycroft.

  She pointed surreptitiously in the direction of the caped figure.

  ‘I’ve been fine, although Mr W over there seems to think that he’s God’s gift to women. He invited me to join him in a few unpublished works. A few flowery phrases and he thinks I’m his.’

  ‘The cad!’ exclaimed Mycroft, getting up. ‘I think I might just punch him on the nose!’

  Polly pulled his sleeve and made him sit down. She was flushed and excited at the idea of her septuagenarian husband and Wordsworth getting into a fight over her—it would have been quite a boast at the Women’s Federation meeting.

  ‘Well, really—!’ said Mycroft. ‘These poets are terrible philanderers.’ He paused. ‘You said no, of course?’

  ‘Well, yes, naturally.’

  She looked at Mycroft with her sweetest smile, but he had moved on.

  ‘Don’t leave “Daffodils” otherwise I won’t know where to find you.’

  He held her hand and together they looked out across the lake. There was no opposite shore, and the pebbles that Wordsworth flicked into the water popped back out after a moment or two and landed back on the foreshore. Aside from that, the countryside was indistinguishable from reality.

  ‘I did something a bit silly,’ announced Mycroft quite suddenly, looking down and smoothing the soft grass with his palm.

  ‘How silly?’ asked Polly, mindful of the precariousness of the situation.

  ‘I burned the Chuzzlewit manuscript.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I said—‘

  ‘I heard. Such an original manuscript is almost beyond value. Whatever made you do a thing like that?’

  Mycroft sighed. It was not an action he had taken upon himself lightly.

  ‘Without the original manuscript,’ he explained, ‘major disruption of the work is impossible. I told you that maniac removed Mr. Quaverley and had him killed. I didn’t think he’d stop there. Who would be next? Mrs. Gamp? Mr. Pecksniff? Martin Chuzzlewit himself? I rather think I might have been doing the world a favour.’

  ‘And destroying the manuscript stops this, does it?’

  ‘Of course; no original manuscript, no mass disruption.’

  She held his hand tightly as a shadow fell across them both. ‘Time’s up,’ said Felix8.

  I had been right and wrong over my predictions regarding Acheron’s actions. As Mycroft told me later, Hades had been furious when he discovered that no one had taken him seriously, but Mycroft’s action in destroying Chuzzlewit simply made him laugh. For a man unused to being hoodwinked, he enjoyed the experience. Instead of tearing him limb from limb as Mycroft had suspected, he merely shook him by the hand.

  ‘Congratulations, Mr Next.’ He smiled. ‘Your act was brave and ingenious. Brave, ingenious but sadly self-defeating. I didn’t choose Chuzzlewit by chance, you know.’

  ‘No?’ retorted Mycroft.

  ‘No. I was made to study the book at O-level and really got to hate the smug little shit. All that moralising and endless harking on about the theme of selfishness. I find Chuzzlewit only marginally less tedious than Our Mutual Friend. Even if they had paid the ransom I would have killed him anyway and enjoyed the experience tremendously.’

  He stopped talking, smiled at Mycroft and continued:

  ‘Your intervention has allowed Martin Chuzzlewit to continue his adventures. Todger’s boarding house will not be torched and they can continue their unamusing little lives unperturbed.’

  ‘I am glad of that,’ replied Mycroft.

  ‘Save your sentiments, Mr Next, I haven’t finished. In view of your actions I will have to find an alternative. A book which unlike Chuzzlewit has genuine literary merits.’

  ‘Not Great Expectations’?’

  Acheron looked at him sadly.

  ‘We’re beyond Dickens now, Mr Next. I would have liked to have gone into Hamlet and throttled that insufferably gloomy Dane, or even skipped into Romeo and Juliet and snuffed out that little twerp Romeo.’ He sighed before continuing. ‘Sadly, none of the Bard’s original manuscripts survive.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps the Bennett family could do with some thinning…’

  ‘Pride and Prejudice!?’ yelled Mycroft. ‘You heartless monster!’

  ‘Flattery will not help you now, Mycroft. Pride and Prejudice without Elizabeth or Darcy would be a trifle lame, don’t you think? But perhaps not Austen. Why not Trollope? A well-placed nail-bomb in Barchester might be an amusing distraction. I’m sure the loss of Mr Crawley would cause a few feathers to fly. So you see, my dear Mycroft, saving Mr Chuzzlewit might have been a very foolish act indeed.’

  He smiled again and spoke to Felix8.

  ‘My friend, why don’t you make some enquiries and find out the extent of original manuscripts and their whereabouts?’

  Felix8 looked at Acheron coldly.

  ‘I’m not a clerk, sir. I think Mr Hobbes would be eminently more suitable for that task.’

  Acheron frowned. Of all the Felixes only Felix3 had ever contradicted a direct order. The hapless Felix3 was liquidated following a very disappointing performance when he hesitated during a robbery. It had been Acheron’s own fault, of course; he had tried to endow Felix3 with slightly more personality at the expense of allowing him a pinch of morality. Ever since then he had given up on the Felixes as anything but loyal servants; Hobbes and Dr Mьller had to be his company these days.

  ‘Hobbes!’ shouted Hades at the top of his voice. The unemployed actor scuttled in from the direction of the kitchens holding a large wooden spoon.

  ‘Yes, sire?’

  Acheron repeated the order to Hobbes, who bowed and withdrew.

  ‘Felix8!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If it’s not too much trouble, lock Mycroft in his room. I dare say we will have no need of him for a couple of weeks. Give him no water for two days and no food for five. That should be punishment enough for disposing o
f the manuscript.’

  Felix8 nodded and removed Mycroft from the hotel’s old lounge. He took him out into the lobby and up the broad marble staircase. They were the only ones in the mouldering hotel; the large front door was locked and bolted.

  Mycroft stopped by the window and looked out. He had once visited the Welsh capital as a guest of the Republic to give a talk on synthesising oil from coal. He had been put up in this very hotel, met anyone who was anyone and even had a rare audience with the highly revered Brodyr Ulyanov, octogenarian father of the modern Welsh Republic. It would have been nearly thirty years ago, and the low-lying city had not changed much. The signs of heavy industry still dominated the landscape and the odour of ironworks hung in the air. Although many of the mines had closed in recent years, the winding gears had not been removed; they punctuated the landscape like sentinels, rising darkly above the squat slate-roofed houses. Above the city on Morlais hill the massive limestone statue of John Frost looked down upon the Republic he had founded; there had been talk of moving the capital away from the industrialised South but Merthyr was as much a spiritual centre as anything else.

  They walked on and presently came to Mycroft’s cell, a windowless room with only the barest furniture. As he was locked in and left alone, Mycroft’s thoughts turned to that which troubled him most: Polly. He had always thought she was a bit of a flirt but nothing more; and Mr Wordsworth’s continued interest in her caused him no small amount of jealous anxiety.

  25. Time enough for contemplation

  ‘I hadn’t thought that Chuzzlewit was a popular book, but I was wrong. Not one of us expected the public outcry and media attention that his murder provoked. Mr Quaverley’s autopsy was a matter of public record; his burial was attended by 150,000 Dickens fans from around the globe. Braxton Hicks told us to say nothing about the LiteraTec involvement, but news soon leaked out.’

  Bowden Cable, speaking to The Owl newspaper

  Commander Braxton Hicks threw the newspaper on the desk in front of us. He paced around for a bit before collapsing heavily into his chair.

  ‘I want to know who told the press,’ he announced. Jack Schitt was leaning on the window frame and watching us all while smoking a rather small arid foul-smelling Turkish cigarette. The headline was unequivocal:

  Chuzzlewit death: SpecOps blamed It went on to outline specifically how ‘unnamed sources’ within Swindon SpecOps had intimated that a botched ransom payment had been the cause of Quaverley’s death. It was arse about face but the basic facts were correct. It had placed Hicks under a lot of pressure and caused him to overspend his precious budget by a phenomenal amount to try to discover Hades’ whereabouts. The spotter plane that Bowden and I had pursued had been found a burned-out wreck in a field on the English side of Hay-on-Wye. The Gladstone full of the counterfeit money was close by along with the ersatz Gainsborough. It hadn’t fooled Acheron for one second. We were all convinced that Hades was in Wales but even political intervention at the highest level had drawn a blank—the Welsh Home Secretary himself had sworn that they would not knowingly stoop to harbour such a notorious criminal. With no jurisdiction on the Welsh side of the border, our searches had centred around the Marches—to no avail.

  ‘If the press found out, it wasn’t from us,’ said Victor. ‘We have nothing to gain from press coverage and everything to lose.’ He glanced over at Jack Schitt, who shrugged.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ said Schitt non-committally, ‘I’m just an observer, here at the behest of Goliath.’

  Braxton got up and paced the room. Bowden, Victor and I watched him in silence. We felt sorry for him; he wasn’t a bad man, just weak. The whole affair was a poisoned chalice, and if he wasn’t removed by the regional SpecOps commander, Goliath would as likely as not do the job themselves.

  ‘Does anyone have any ideas?’

  We all looked at him. We had a few ideas, but nothing that could be said in front of Schitt; since he was so willing to let us be killed that evening at Archer’s place, not one of us would have given Goliath so much as the time of day.

  ‘Has Mrs Delamare been traced?’

  ‘We found her okay,’ I replied. ‘She was delighted to discover that she had a motorway services named after her. She hasn’t seen her son for five years but is under surveillance in case he tries to make contact.’

  ‘Good,’ murmured Braxton. ‘What else?’

  Victor spoke.

  ‘We understand Felix has been replaced. A young man named Danny Chance went missing from Reading; his face was found in a waste basket on the third floor of the multistorey. We’ve distributed the morgue photos of Felix; they should match the new Felix.’

  ‘Are you sure Archer didn’t say anything but “Felix” before you killed him?’ asked Hicks.

  ‘Positive,’ assured Bowden in his best lying voice.

  We returned to the LiteraTec office in a glum mood. Braxton’s removal might provoke a dangerous shake-up in the department, and I had Mycroft and Polly to think of. Victor hung up his coat and called across to Finisterre, asking him if there had been any change. Finisterre looked up from a much-thumbed copy of Chuzzlewit. He, Bailey and Herr Bight had been rereading it on a twenty-four-hour relay basis since Acheron’s escape. Nothing seemed to have changed. It was slightly perplexing. The Forty brothers had been working on the only piece of information we had that SO-5 or Goliath didn’t. Sturmey Archer had made a reference to a Dr Mьller before expiring and that had been the subject of a rigorous search on SpecOps and police databases. A rigorous yet secretive search; that was what had taken the time.

  ‘Anything, Jeff?’ asked Victor, rolling up his shirtsleeves.

  Jeff coughed.

  ‘There are no Dr Mьllers registered in England or on the Continent, either in medicine or philosophy–‘

  ‘So it’s a false name.’

  ‘—who are alive.’ Jeff smiled. ‘However, there was a Dr Mьller in attendance at Parkhurst prison in 1972.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘It was at the same time that Delamare was banged up for fraud.’

  This is getting better.’

  ‘And Delamare had a cellmate named Felix Tabularasa.’

  ‘There’s a face that fits,’ murmured Bowden.

  ‘Right. Dr Mьller was already under investigation for selling donor kidneys. He committed suicide in ‘74 shortly before the hearing. Swam into the sea after leaving a note. His body was never recovered.’

  Victor rubbed his hands together happily.

  ‘Sounds like a faked death. How do we go about hunting down a dead man?’

  Jeff held up a fax.

  ‘I’ve had to use up a lot of favours at the English Medical Council; they don’t like giving out personal files whether the subject is alive or dead, but here it is.’

  Victor took the fax and read out the pertinent points.

  ‘Theodore Mьller. Majored in physics before pursuing a career in medicine. Struck off in ‘74 for gross professional misconduct. He was a fine tenor, a good Hamlet at Cambridge, Brother of the Most Worshipful Order of the Wombat, keen train-spotter and a founder member of the Earthcrossers.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I murmured. ‘It’s a good bet that he might continue to indulge himself in old hobbies even if he was living under an assumed name.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’ asked Victor. ‘Wait until the next steam train extravaganza? I understand the Mallard is defending her speed record next month.’

  ‘Not soon enough.’

  ‘The Wombats never disclose membership,’ observed Bowden.

  Victor nodded. ‘Well, that’s that, then.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was thinking more about someone infiltrating the next Earthcrossers meeting.’

  ‘Earthcrossers?’ said Victor with more than his fair share of incredulity. ‘You’ve got no chance, Thursday. Weird lunatics doing strange things privately on deserted hillsides? Do you know what
you have to go through to be admitted to their exclusive club?’

  I smiled.

  ‘It’s mostly distinguished and respected professional people of mature years.’

  Victor looked at Bowden and myself in turn.

  ‘I don’t like that look you’re giving me.’

  Bowden quickly scoured a copy of the current Astronomer’s Almanac.

  ‘Bingo. It says here that they meet on Liddington Hill at two p.m. the day after tomorrow. That gives us fifty-five hours to prepare.’

  ‘No way,’ said Victor indignantly. ‘There is no way, I repeat, no way on God’s own earth that you are going to get me to pose as an Earthcrosser.’

  26. The Earthcrossers

  ‘An asteroid can be any size from a man’s fist to a mountain. They are the detritus of the solar system, the rubbish left over after the workmen have been and gone. Most of the asteroids around today occupy a space between Mars and Jupiter. There are millions of them, yet their combined mass is a fraction of the Earth’s. Every now and then an asteroid’s orbit coincides with that of Earth. An Earthcrosser. To the Earthcrossers Society the arrival of an asteroid at a planet is the return of a lost orphan, a prodigal son. It is a matter of some consequence.’

  Mr. S.A. Orbiter. The Earthcrossers

  Liddington Hill overlooks the RAF and later Luftwaffe airfield of Wroughton. The low hill is also home to an Iron Age fort, one of several that ring the Marlborough and Lambourn downs. The antiquity of the site, however, was not what attracted the Earthcrossers. They had gathered in almost every country of the globe, following the peculiar predictions of their calling in an apparently random fashion. They always observed the same routine: name the site, do a very good deal with the owners for exclusivity, then move in the month before using either local security or more junior members of the group to ensure that no infiltrators find their way in. It was perhaps due to this extreme secrecy that the militant astronomical group managed to keep what they did absolutely quiet. It seemed an almost perfect hiding place for Dr Mьller, who co-devised the society in the early fifties with Samuel Orbiter, a notable television astronomer of the time. Victor parked his car and walked nonchalantly up to two huge gorilla-sized men who were standing next to a Land Rover. Victor looked to the left and right. Every three hundred yards was a group of armed security men with walkie-talkies and dogs, keeping an eye out for trespassers. There was no way on earth that anyone could slip by unseen. The best means of entering anywhere you aren’t allowed to go is to walk in the front door as though you own the place.